Sacred Humanness

John R Gavazzoni

Thousand Oaks, CA

Nothing has more singularly impacted and informed me in my quest for truth than that moment many years ago when these words formed in my mind from my spirit: "Christ is the Truth, and all truth comes into clear focus in our Lord's life, death and resurrection." In our Lord's Person, Truth unfolded itself---and to get immediately to the heart of my
message--- it unfolded, not in the guise of manhood, but AS manhood, as humanness, in flesh, as flesh.

He especially relished being known as the Son of Man. He wore it as a badge of honor. Son of God He was, indeed, but He preferred that a disciple should have His divine sonship revealed as that disciple witnessed Him in action as the Son of Man. Over and over again, He referred to Himself as the Son of Man and did so with a special ring of majestic dignity. In Himself, the humanity that originates out from the midst of Deity found perfect expression and was demonstrated to be without ontological contradiction.

How very undisciplined of mind are those who deny the sacredness of humanness; how unaware are they of how violently they oppose the apostolic testimony of the nature our Lord's true Personhood. Unaware of the spirit of error slithering through their thought processes (while they imagine themselves to be at the forefront of revelation), they forget utterly, or choose to ignore how the Beloved John brings to light Deity's determination to become in the age(s) what It is from eternity with those familiar, but seldom appreciated or understood words, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

Though the testimony of scripture is clear that God has embodied His glory, full of grace and truth, in flesh, in humanness, in manhood, yet history repeats itself in the notion---now spread abroad among the brethren---that humanity is the invention of man's fallen mind. Poor Paul, he was so misguided and immature in his thinking when he wrote that "there is one mediator between God and men, the MAN Christ Jesus. 1 Tim.2:5" Poor Paul, setting forth an imaginary mediator.

Poor apostles who came to believe that Jesus arose bodily from the grave; by bodily, meaning that the same human body that had hung on the cross, came out of the grave to go on to be part and parcel of the glorified Christ. By the way, dear ones, if you're still not clear on the concept, the only body that needs resurrecting, is a dead body.

It wasn't some other spirit-body that came out of the tomb. It was a man, fully human, a flesh and bones man, THE MAN, who now liveth forevermore, who was raised from the dead, and in whom we claim our eternal inheritance.

The apostle of incarnational theology, St. John, counted it of greatest importance that we should believe that Jesus (that's the Lord's human
name) is the Son of God, and that Christ is come in the flesh. He didn't come in some kind of strange flesh that was not intrinsic to His Personhood.

His being wasn't simply rattling around inside a temporary container.
His body, which for a season was subjected to our sin, suffering and death, came forth out of the depths of the Being of God. In resurrection, He divested Himself of all that was alien to His true humanness and now sits on high as the glorified Man, the source of the New Humanity in which we all share.

Read the following carefully, "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses the Son has the Father also. 1 Jn. 2:23"
What Son is this whom John writes? It is the Son-of-Man-Son-of-God Son.
Test the spirits, beloved, for there are many spirits that have gone out into the world, and not all the spirits are of God. You are not glorifying the Father---as you have been deluded into thinking---when you deny the Humanity of the Son and the Humanity that we have in Him.

Peter had to have that drummed into his head by a thrice-repeated vision, accompanied each time by the command to "take and eat." God knew that Peter's religious mind-set was one that did not recognize the essential sacredness of ALL humanness, so the Lord went to the extreme of presenting to Peter animals that were, under the dispensation of the law, unclean and forbidden as food to make a most important point.

The Lord vividly corrected his prejudice in a way that he would find hard to forget, though later he did backslide on that issue in at least one situation. Being, in a measure, still of a legal mind-set that discriminated between Jewish and non-Jewish flesh, and facing a God-induced crisis which involved being sent, by the undeniable voice of God, to the home of a gentile to preach Christ, Peter receives this vision and ends up getting the point of it, that the unclean animals in the vision represented the nations, all the ethnic-groupings, and that he should not call anything that God had cleansed, common or unclean.

You see, brethren, when the Son of God took humanness to Himself, it was our humanness, and by so doing, He forever demonstrated the sacredness of humanness. Now, what is being propagated, is not simply a bias against and rejection of a portion of humanity, but a repudiation of all humanity's sacredness, and I press upon those who are in this state of
confusion: CALL THOU NOT COMMON OR UNCLEAN WHAT GOD HAS CLEANSED.

God, in Christ, has sanctified us wholly. In Christ, in union with Him, we are the multiplication and extension of the divine glory that is only fully expressed in the form of humanness. To reject your humanity as non-integral and alien to your spiritual being, is to reject the glory of God and to be found in opposition to Father God's expression of Himself in a human Son.

Christ's Humanness, and ours in Him springs from the deepest depth of Deity. Our soilish constitution, in its present state, is the very glory of God incognito. God formed Adam of the dust of the ground. Did you get that? He didn't say that He only formed a body for Adam from the dust of the ground. He formed Adam, Adam himself, from the dust.

Man is formed dust, and that dust is of the very substance of God/Spirit translated from eternity into time. More precisely, the dust from which we are formed is of the very substance of the Son and sons of God. Adam was clothed with a body from the inside out, out of his very son-substance.

That intrinsic linkage explains why all creation is dependent upon us realizing the liberty of our glory in order for it to be delivered from its bondage to decay. All creation must return to its primal glory and it will do so from the inside out, for "the whole earth is full of His glory."
Isa. 6: 3